Our test bench: about thirty engines measured on the same archives. See the engines compared →

Tool	Who makes it	Where	Status · model	What it does	What it doesn’t do
wondarchive	A researcher, for their own fonds first	🇫🇷 France	company · plans and extra pages	deposit, straightening, transcription, translation, reading, search, shelfmarks, correction, tags, notes, timeline and map; one-click citation and TEI coming soon	training a model on a specific hand
Transkribus	READ-COOP SCEEuropean cooperative founded in 2019, 250 member institutions	🇦🇹 Innsbruck	cooperative · subscription and credits (Scholar €99/year, 900 pages)	handwriting and print recognition, trainable models, tables, publishing sites	translation, managing trip photos, straightening
eScriptorium and Kraken	EPHE – Université PSLScripta project, digital humanities team; Kraken by Benjamin Kiessling	🇫🇷 Paris	public research · free, open-source software	very fine segmentation and recognition, model training	hosting — needs a server and an engineer; translation; a general-public interface
Arkindex	Tekliaspecialist archives-and-museums SME, since 2019	🇫🇷 Paris	company · open platform, services for institutions	mass processing, document pipelines, structured extraction, API	selling to individuals: it’s an institutional tool
Tropy	RRCHNM, George Mason University, with C²DH Luxembourg and Digital Scholar	🇺🇸 Virginia · 🇱🇺	university · free, open-source software, on your machine	organising, describing and annotating archive photos	no transcription, no translation, nothing online
ABBYY FineReader	ABBYYpublisher, United States	🇺🇸	company · software licence	good-quality desktop OCR on clean print, PDF	crooked trip photos, manuscript, a corpus, translation
Google Document AI · Amazon Textract · Azure AI Vision	Google, Amazon, Microsoft	🇺🇸	cloud platforms · pay-per-call, for developers	robust generic OCR, to integrate yourself	everything else: no interface, no corpus, no reading
OCR4all	University of Würzburg	🇩🇪	public research · free, open-source	old printed matter, Gothic script, full pipeline to install	hosting, translation, trip photos
DeepL	DeepL SE	🇩🇪 Cologne	company · subscription	translation only, very high quality	doesn’t read an image; it’s the next step, not the tool

Facts checked in September 2026 on publishers’ own sites: READ-COOP SCE, eScriptorium at EPHE, Arkindex by Teklia, Tropy at RRCHNM. Transkribus prices are those shown on their own site.

Which tool for your fonds?

Reading-room photos, manuscript, Fraktur, clean scans, no budget or a lab: the guide to choosing starts from your situation and ends with a tool.

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Where the tools that read your archives come from

Which tool for your fonds?

A comparison per tool

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